James Nicholson and David Pascual in the telephone room of Sandbox Suites, a co-working space.
Photo by Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle
Ran on: 02-19-2008
James Nicholson and David Pascual work in the telephone room of Sandbox Suites in San Francisco. It is one of a number of communal spaces that offer work areas to people without their own offices.

Working at home was too lonely for Summer Powell, a 35-year-old freelance graphic designer who had recently moved to San Francisco. She tried working in cafes but found it too distracting. So Powell called a friend and together they joined a communal drop-in office space called Sandbox Suites - an example of a new and growing work arrangement called co-working.

"This seems more like in between home and office," Powell said, sitting with her laptop in a carrel last week in the airy main room of Sandbox Suites, while several other freelancers typed quietly nearby and two Web entrepreneurs conferred over lunches and laptops at a big table on a second-floor landing. "It gives me a scrappy startup feeling in a good way."

Laptop nomads - that growing tribe of folks who can be found typing away at any cafe with wireless Internet access - are starting to put down roots. And some, like Powell, are doing it through co-working, a 21st century twist on the old idea of the shared artists' studio.

In co-working, a group of freelancers or other solo entrepreneurs share one big office space with perks that they might not get at home, such as conference rooms, espresso machines and opportunities for socializing.

Co-working sites usually give members the option of renting a desk that becomes their own reserved space. But most also provide a drop-in option, where people can stop by and work in an unreserved common area for a lower fee - or sometimes even for free.

"We went through a spurt of roaming around people's apartments, but the ergonomics aren't there so it starts to hurt after a while," said Anthony Young, 31, one of the Web entrepreneurs working upstairs from Powell at Sandbox Suites. "Having a consistent, reliable place to go work is good for keeping your head straight."

The spaces are as varied as their founders, ranging from funky industrial lofts to sleeker sites with a more corporate ambiance. But most of them are part of a grassroots international movement that is loosely connected through the Internet.

And the Bay Area - with about a half dozen co-working sites up and running - is one of the hotbeds of the movement.

"We definitely have a stronger presence," said Steve King of Emergent Research in Lafayette, who studied co-working as part of a report on the future of small business. "We have a vibrant personal-business community in the Bay Area. And because it's very tech- and media-focused, it fits in well with the concepts of co-working."

If it's possible to identify a founder of the movement, it might be Brad Neuberg, a 31-year-old San Francisco inventor and open-source software developer who coined the term "co-working."

Neuberg had left a tech startup to work for himself but missed the camaraderie of an office.

"I started asking myself, 'Why can't I combine the structure and community of a job with the freedom and independence of working for myself?' " he said.

In 2005, Neuberg arranged to rent space two days a week from a Mission District event venue, setting up card tables each day to provide a work surface. Gradually other people started joining him - a computer science researcher, an entrepreneur, open source developers and a filmmaker.

"I remember some great conversations, brainstorming sessions, and lunches as we all got to know each other and zinged ideas off one another," he said. "I even led some yoga classes in the space for awhile."

Neuberg eventually disbanded his site, but some participants went on to start other co-working sites such as the Hat Factory near Potrero Hill and Citizen Space on Second Street.

Co-working is certainly not the only form of shared work space. Painters and other cash-strapped artists have shared studios for as long as anyone held a brush. Writers have clustered in shared offices such as San Francisco's Grotto.

On the corporate side, business centers such as the Regus Group or, in the Bay Area, Pacific Business Centers offer private offices and conference rooms that can be rented for short amounts of time. Such centers are popular among traveling salespeople and startup firms that are not quite ready to lease permanent space.

There are also business incubators - shared work spaces typically run by local government or nonprofit groups, dedicated to helping new ventures grow and become sources of local jobs.

Co-working differs from incubators in that it is aimed at solo freelancers, not just businesses with the potential for growth and job creation.

It differs from Regus-type business centers not only in cost - co-working is much less expensive - but also in its goal of creating a sense of community among users.

Many co-working pioneers came out of the open-source software movement, which believes in making source code freely available for use by anyone around the globe.

They approached co-working not just as a business model but as a mission - a way to extend open-source-style collaboration into other parts of life.

So co-working sites often host a variety of after-hours gatherings that range from movie nights to "hackathons" where scores of programmers converge to solve software problems.

"We've had some interesting open meetings," said Tara Hunt, co-founder of Citizen Space. "One tenant wrote a plan on the whiteboard for something that included mock-ups. Some drop-ins came in and edited it like a wiki (a collaborative Web site), with a bunch of really cool suggestions. He said, 'Omigod, I didn't think of that.' "

At Citizen Space last week, Hunt worked on decorating the room's cinderblock walls while several members typed quietly at their keyboards. A whiteboard in the middle of the room was filled with notes from someone's business meeting.

Across town at Sandbox Suites, owner Roman Gelfer brewed espressos while Powell hovered over her laptop. Young talked with his colleague Jesse Andrews about a dance-related Web site they were developing that was not yet public.

Both scenes illustrated one potential pitfall of co-working - lack of privacy. With strangers dropping in to work at adjacent desks, how can people ensure that their whiteboard notes or pre-launch conversations don't fall into a competitor's hands?

Co-working participants say privacy hasn't turned out to be a problem.

"If it's really sensitive, I can take my phone and go into a conference room," said Greg Burton, 57, an online marketing consultant who works out of Sandbox Suites.

"The amount of productivity that would be lost in roaming from coffee shop to coffee shop is greater than any potential competitive losses here," said Andrews, 29.

For now, the precise direction that co-working will take remains unclear.

One possible route is the creation of more grassroots, mission-driven sites like Citizen Space. Another possibility is the rise of co-working chains - cookie-cutter facilities like health clubs that are less of a movement and more of a corporate enterprise. In Santa Clara, a traditional business center, Bowers Office Center, started offering a co-working option several months ago.

"There could be a Starbucks-ification of co-working, or in fact, Starbucks could do it themselves," said Chris Messina, who co-founded Citizen Space with Hunt.

Workplace expert King predicts that, regardless of its form, co-working is poised for a big takeoff.

That's due to the growing number of one-person businesses, which rose from 16.5 million in 2000 to 20.4 million in 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"We're seeing a clear trend to free agents and personal businesses, due to outsourcing, layoffs, and people looking for work-life balance or more work flexibility," said King. "That's going to result in more people working on their own either full or part time. Those folks need support. And what's really cool about co-working is it solves that problem for a very modest amount of money."

Online resources

For background information on co-working and a list of co-working spaces around the world, see coworking.pbwiki.com.

What does co-working cost?

Every co-working site has a different fee structure, but they typically cost less than renting a private office. Two examples:

Citizen Space charges $350 per month for a private desk, 24-hour access and unlimited use of the conference room. It charges $250 for 24-hour access but no private desk. Drop-ins, who can access the space when other users are present and may take any empty seat, are free.

Sandbox Suites charges $495 per month for a private desk, 24-hour access and eight hours per month of conference room time. It has a sliding scale down to $135, which includes one day's use per week, no private desk and no conference time. Drop-ins pay $20 for half a day or $38 for a full day.